Returning to Your First Loveনমুনা

Jesus Calls Us to Embrace His Holiness

Our desire for Jesus is essential, and this is why the Lord revives it when we have drawn back from it. In all of my doings, all of my comings and goings, all of my seasons and all of life’s twists and turns, I want my desire for Jesus to be as a fiery flame, unquenched and strong. Where desire has grown dull is where I have lost the very heart of life. Where hunger for Him has been pacified is where I have settled for distractions rather than highest delight.

Desire for Jesus is so precious. The more desirous we are for the Lord, the more truly alive we are. Conversely, the degree of our lack of hunger is the degree of our deadness and the measure of our disconnect from what we were actually fashioned for. We were made for Him.

Our hunger, not fearing delays or the pain of yearning, hears all that is available, all that the future holds in fullness, all that the Creator intended for the present, and it reaches beyond itself until that fullness is found, until that perfect day dawns. Desire escorts us to the desirable One and helps us refuse to be comforted by anything or anyone less.

Most of the time, our problem is not that we want Him too much, but that we want Him too little. We fool ourselves to think that shutting down desire is doing ourselves a favor. We fool ourselves to think that wanting more of God is not our portion. Desire and delight are intricately knitted, and you cannot have one without the other. We can only delight in as much as we have desired.

Only the hungry get Jesus. Only the desperate find Him. Let us not keep the Lord waiting for our wanting of Him. Let us lift our hunger to Him and ask that He breathe on it, that He cause it to increase. Let us recount every taste that we have had of His goodness and of the glories to come, that our souls might be lifted from the slum of dullness and distraction and disillusionment, and return to the sheer pleasure of holy passion for Him.

Questions to Ponder: How does holiness relate to our desire for Jesus? In what ways can you delight yourself in the Lord today?